Nov 8, 2025
10:00am - 2:30pm
ET
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2025-11-08T00:00:00
2025-11-08T00:00:00
America/New_York
Symposium: Public History in Authoritarian Times
Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
The MacMillan Center, Yale University
Free & open to the public
In-person only
As an academic institution dedicated to free inquiry and the search for truth, Yale University is committed to free expression. View the university’s free expression guidelines here.
"Promote, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it should be enlightened."
President George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
Since the 1970s, public history has become an important dimension of the historical profession. For decades, worldwide scholars, museum staff, community organizations, and others have worked together to make historical education accessible and relevant to broad publics. By emphasizing the experiences and perspectives of previously underrepresented people, public history research and programming offers nuanced and rich interpretations of dominant historical narratives of the past.
The work of public history combines traditional archival research with attention to objects, untold stories of place, memory, multiple points of view, community traditions and oral testimony. The field of public history provides possibilities for diverse and democratic understandings of the past. This is especially crucial for efforts to come to terms with the most challenging aspects of history.
Increasingly, recent efforts to accurately and honestly grapple with historical complexity in classrooms and cultural institutions are under attack. These attacks on public education, and on the independence and integrity of key institutions such as the National Park Service and the Smithsonian, demonstrate that the current presidential administration in the United States is waging war against historical and critical truth-telling. In exchange, they support uncritical “patriotic” education, which emphasizes American nationalism and exceptionalism. Never before has the executive branch of government, with its enormous resources, waged such a battle against the practice of history and the diffusion of knowledge.
Long committed to public historical education in its many forms, the Gilder Lehrman Center seeks to provide a forum to discuss these alarming trends. Scholars and supporters will offer comparative perspectives on historical reckonings with authoritarianism, while analyzing current realities with an eye toward building strong public history foundations for the future. We invite you to join us in November for respectful engagement with these topics.
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